so ive been sitting on this decision for like three months now and i keep flipping back and forth and honestly its driving me crazy. background is im upgrading from an old FT-450D which has served me well but i want something with a better receiver and ideally a waterfall i can actually use without an external panadapter.

the 7300 seems like the obvious choice for the price and everyone and their dog recommends it, the waterfall is genuinely useful from what ive seen at the club and the DSP filtering is supposed to be excellent. but then i get on here and read about the 590SG's analog front end and how it handles strong signal environments better and i start second guessing myself again. i mostly do domestic HF, some CW, maybe getting into FT8 more seriously. not really a DXer chasing rare ones.

has anyone actually run both of these side by side or switched from one to the other? not looking for specs i can read on eham, more like real world stuff — does the 7300 actually fall apart when there's a strong adjacent signal or is that more of a theoretical concern for the kind of operating most of us actually do

had the 590SG for about four years then picked up a 7300 when the price dropped and ran them both in the shack for a while before selling the Kenwood. honest take: for what you're describing the 7300 is probably fine. the strong signal handling stuff you read about is real but its really only noticeable if you're running without an attenuator near a broadcast station or during a contest with a very active band. day to day domestic HF and FT8 the 7300 is genuinely great and that waterfall becomes something you rely on more than you'd expect. the 590SG is a more mature design and some guys just prefer it, nothing wrong with that, but for a first serious HF rig the icom is hard to argue with at that price point. just my two cents, ymmv.

i went through the exact same thing lol ended up with the 7300 about eight months ago and havent regretted it. the waterfall alone changed how i operate, i can see activity on 40m at a glance and it makes band conditions way more intuitive. only thing i'll say is get a decent external speaker because the internal one is pretty mediocre, makes a bigger difference than you'd think for long operating sessions. for FT8 the USB audio integration is really straightforward too, way less hassle than i expected setting it up with WSJT-X.